“All the people who live in Auckland”: A study of subject and non-subject relative clauses in Auckland English

<p>This thesis is a study of the variation in relative marker choice by speakers of Auckland English. The data used in this study was collected as part of “Breaking Babel – Rethinking Language Change in a super-diverse city” (Meyerhoff et al. 2015). The thesis investigates the syntactic and social conditioning on the variation of the complementisers used to introduce relative clauses in the speech of a diverse group of Aucklanders. As a super-diverse city with a rapidly changing sociolinguistic profile, Auckland offers a rich source of data. This research explores how syntactic variation marks speakers of “Auckland English”. This work addresses several key research questions which centre on whether there is evidence of language change for this variable, and if so where has the change been initiated and by whom is it lead. Further, how does the variation in Auckland English compare other communities studied, both in terms of studies of relative clause variation and variation in super-diverse cities. These questions derive from an exploration of the history of relative clauses in English. In chapter 2, I review how the current variable system of relative markers developed and how they have been treated both by syntacticians and variationists in previous literature. The purpose of a (restrictive) relative clause is to delimit the denotational reference of an antecedent head nominal that it post-modifies (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 1034–1035). As such, variation in the choice of complementiser that introduces relative clauses tells us a great deal about how speakers specify information. The variability of relative markers is highly circumscribed (Ball 1996, Levey 2014). Nevertheless, the syntactic and social factors governing their distribution vary between speech communities and can offer insight into the linguistic profiles of these communities (Tagliamonte et al 2005, D’Arcy and Tagliamonte 2010). This study analyses over 2000 tokens of relative clauses, coded for syntactic environment and speaker age, sex and community. Three communities, chosen for their differing demographic profiles, are sampled across Auckland. Significant predictors of relative marker choice are then compared to other studies of relative clause variation. This thesis then explores (i) which factors are universal or common predictors of relativiser choice, (ii) which factors index Auckland English and (iii) which are markers of specific communities within Auckland. Previous studies of superdiverse cities (cf. Cheshire et al. 2015) have shown that the input of many diverse language varieties into a community can lead to large scale innovation and change. I explore the variation in relative markers in Auckland English in this context. Little evidence of language change taking place is found in this study and in fact, social factors such as age-grading patterns may suggest stable variation. There is some evidence of levelling (Trudgill 2004) in the most diverse of the three communities surveyed. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the significance of these results, both to the study of relative clauses and linguistic variation in general.</p>

“All the people who live in Auckland”: A study of subject and non-subject relative clauses in Auckland English

<p>This thesis is a study of the variation in relative marker choice by speakers of Auckland English. The data used in this study was collected as part of “Breaking Babel – Rethinking Language Change in a super-diverse city” (Meyerhoff et al. 2015). The thesis investigates the syntactic and social conditioning on the variation of the complementisers used to introduce relative clauses in the speech of a diverse group of Aucklanders. As a super-diverse city with a rapidly changing sociolinguistic profile, Auckland offers a rich source of data. This research explores how syntactic variation marks speakers of “Auckland English”. This work addresses several key research questions which centre on whether there is evidence of language change for this variable, and if so where has the change been initiated and by whom is it lead. Further, how does the variation in Auckland English compare other communities studied, both in terms of studies of relative clause variation and variation in super-diverse cities. These questions derive from an exploration of the history of relative clauses in English. In chapter 2, I review how the current variable system of relative markers developed and how they have been treated both by syntacticians and variationists in previous literature. The purpose of a (restrictive) relative clause is to delimit the denotational reference of an antecedent head nominal that it post-modifies (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 1034–1035). As such, variation in the choice of complementiser that introduces relative clauses tells us a great deal about how speakers specify information. The variability of relative markers is highly circumscribed (Ball 1996, Levey 2014). Nevertheless, the syntactic and social factors governing their distribution vary between speech communities and can offer insight into the linguistic profiles of these communities (Tagliamonte et al 2005, D’Arcy and Tagliamonte 2010). This study analyses over 2000 tokens of relative clauses, coded for syntactic environment and speaker age, sex and community. Three communities, chosen for their differing demographic profiles, are sampled across Auckland. Significant predictors of relative marker choice are then compared to other studies of relative clause variation. This thesis then explores (i) which factors are universal or common predictors of relativiser choice, (ii) which factors index Auckland English and (iii) which are markers of specific communities within Auckland. Previous studies of superdiverse cities (cf. Cheshire et al. 2015) have shown that the input of many diverse language varieties into a community can lead to large scale innovation and change. I explore the variation in relative markers in Auckland English in this context. Little evidence of language change taking place is found in this study and in fact, social factors such as age-grading patterns may suggest stable variation. There is some evidence of levelling (Trudgill 2004) in the most diverse of the three communities surveyed. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the significance of these results, both to the study of relative clauses and linguistic variation in general.</p>

The theme-recipient alternation in Chinese: tracking syntactic variation across seven centuries

Previous research has tracked the history of the theme-recipient alternation (or: “dative” alternation) in Chinese, but few studies have embedded their analysis in a probabilistic variationist framework. Against this backdrop, we explore the language-internal and language-external factors that probabilistically influence the alternation between theme-first and recipient-first ordering in a large diachronic corpus of Chinese writing (1300s–1900s). Our analysis reveals that the recipient-first variant is consistently more frequent than its competitor and even more common in more recent texts than in older texts. Regression analysis also suggests that there are stable linguistic constraints (i.e., animacy and definiteness of theme) and fluid constraints (i.e., end-weight, recipient animacy). Notably, the diachronic instability of end-weight and animacy points to cross-linguistic parallels for ditransitive constructions, including the English dative alternation. We thus contribute to theory building in variationist linguistics by advancing the field’s knowledge about the comparative fluidity versus stability of probabilistic constraints.

Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift

A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded not to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.

Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in Romanian

The geographical varieties of Romanian spoken in Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and adjacent regions are largely mutually intelligible. More important are the differences between these varieties (known as “Dacoromanian”) and the South-Danubian varieties of Aromanian, Meglenoromanian, and Istroromanian, which have been separated from (Daco-)Romanian for a very long time, but qualify as dialects of Romanian from a historical and comparative Romance perspective. Standard Romanian is based on the southern dialect of Dacoromanian, in particular the variety of Muntenia, but also includes features taken from other dialects (e.g., the 3pl imperfect -au, the absence of “iotacism” in verb forms—văd instead of the etymological vă(d)z ‘see.1sg’ < Lat. *uidi̯o < uideō, with the regular sound change -di̯->-dz->-z-). A unified standard language was established around the middle of the 19th century. Some of the differences between the high and the colloquial register of standard Romanian are due to innovations characterizing southern varieties: the demonstrative system (high register acest(a), acel(a) versus colloquial ăsta, ăla), the future (high register voi [inflected] + infinitive versus colloquial o [uninflected] + subjunctive), the use of the infinitive (more restricted in the colloquial register than in the high register), and the presumptive mood (mostly colloquial, representing a modal epistemic specialization of a future form oi + infinitive, which is itself an innovation with respect to voi + infinitive). Some of the features by which substandard varieties differ from the standard language represent innovations: the replacement of the inflectional dative and genitive by prepositional constructions, the change of the relative pronoun care into a complementizer, and the loss of the number contrast in the 3rd person of verbs (the latter representing a recent development, mostly found in the southern varieties, but also in parts of Crişana and Transylvania). The loss of agreement with the possessee on the genitival article al is an innovation that first appeared in the northern dialect and subsequently gained ground across substandard varieties. Northern varieties, especially in peripheral areas (Crişana, Maramureş, northern Moldova), preserve a number of archaic features that disappeared from the standard language, for example, the productivity of verb-clitic word orders (with both auxiliary and pronominal clitics), the use of al-Genitive-N word orders, the conditional periphrases vream + infinitive and reaş + infinitive (the latter in Banat), and, as a widespread phenomenon, the 3sg=3pl homonymy in the perfect auxiliary (in the form o < au). Compared to the colloquial standard language, northern varieties preserve the infinitive better. An innovative feature characteristic of northern varieties is the use of periphrastic forms for the imperfect and pluperfect. As conservative features found in some nonstandard southern varieties, we may cite the use of the synthetic perfect (which in the standard language is restricted to the written register) and the stress on the oblique determiner/pronominal endings (ăstúia vs. ắstuia).

Effects of manipulating writing task complexity on learners’ performance in completing vocabulary and syntactic tasks

The present study investigated the potential of writing in English as a foreign language (EFL) for language learning by manipulating cognitive task complexity based on related models and hypotheses. English essays written by 59 Chinese postgraduate EFL students from different subject areas were analysed with reference to writing complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Results showed that task complexity had no significant effect on EFL learners’ lexical complexity but had an influence on their syntactic variation in EFL writing. Findings suggest that manipulating writing task complexity could be a feasible means to promoting and enhancing EFL learners’ language learning. Such findings might broaden our understanding of the relationship between EFL writing and language learning in an EFL learning context. The interplay of EFL writing and EFL learning is also pedagogically relevant to those who are interested in appropriately sequencing tasks for more effective language teaching.

Constituting agency in the delivery of telephone-mediated victim support

© 2020, © 2020 Taylor & Francis. In telephone helpline interactions, a practical problem for participants is how to advance a relevant course of action about what can be done within the institution’s remit that may not be what a caller asks for or needs. This study investigates how call-takers progress delivering support for callers ringing a service for victims of crime and trauma. It focuses on how actions are advanced by the call-taker using linguistic formats that can be broadly characterised as directive-commissive speech acts. The research asks how agency is constituted through the linguistic format parties’ use to display what can be done and who decides. Using conversation analysis to examine 80 cases where the delivery of support is progressed, the results show that subtle morpho-syntactic variation in the format of interrogatives (i.e., ‘Did you want to,’ ‘Do you want to’) display orientations to who can do or decide upon a future course of action. Evidence is presented that the ‘did you form’ tilts the agency toward the Self as something she can progress whereas the ‘do you’ format tilts the balance toward the Other to decide. More obviously, the actions can be formulated in terms of the Self committing to an action (e.g., ‘I’ll pop you through’) or as clearly deferring to the Other to decide (e.g., ‘would you like me to’). This study furthers the general intellectual project of discursive psychology by providing an empirical demonstration of the way classic questions about the nature of subjectivity and individual agency can be re-specified as shared practices for accomplishing action in social interaction.

Constituting agency in the delivery of telephone-mediated victim support

© 2020, © 2020 Taylor & Francis. In telephone helpline interactions, a practical problem for participants is how to advance a relevant course of action about what can be done within the institution’s remit that may not be what a caller asks for or needs. This study investigates how call-takers progress delivering support for callers ringing a service for victims of crime and trauma. It focuses on how actions are advanced by the call-taker using linguistic formats that can be broadly characterised as directive-commissive speech acts. The research asks how agency is constituted through the linguistic format parties’ use to display what can be done and who decides. Using conversation analysis to examine 80 cases where the delivery of support is progressed, the results show that subtle morpho-syntactic variation in the format of interrogatives (i.e., ‘Did you want to,’ ‘Do you want to’) display orientations to who can do or decide upon a future course of action. Evidence is presented that the ‘did you form’ tilts the agency toward the Self as something she can progress whereas the ‘do you’ format tilts the balance toward the Other to decide. More obviously, the actions can be formulated in terms of the Self committing to an action (e.g., ‘I’ll pop you through’) or as clearly deferring to the Other to decide (e.g., ‘would you like me to’). This study furthers the general intellectual project of discursive psychology by providing an empirical demonstration of the way classic questions about the nature of subjectivity and individual agency can be re-specified as shared practices for accomplishing action in social interaction.

Syntactic Features and the Limits of Syntactic Change

This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed to differences in the features of items in the lexicon, as the Borer-Chomsky conjecture proposes. In answering this question, all the chapters develop analyses of syntactic change couched within a formalist framework in which rich hierarchical structures and abstract features of various kinds play an important role. The first three parts of the volume explore the different domains of the clause, namely the C-domain, the T-domain and the ν‎P/VP-domain respectively, while chapters in the final part are concerned with establishing methodology in diachronic syntax and modelling linguistic correspondences. The contributors draw on extensive data from a large number of languages and dialects, including several that have received little attention in the literature on diachronic syntax, such as Romeyka, a Greek variety spoken in Turkey, and Middle Low German, previously spoken in northern Germany. Other languages are explored from a fresh theoretical perspective, including Hungarian, Icelandic, and Austronesian languages. The volume sheds light not only on specific syntactic changes from a cross-linguistic perspective but also on broader issues in language change and linguistic theory.